Animals and Birds Caught in Traps Display
Spartan Fortitude, and Toads
Imprisoned in Rocks Grow Fat.
At a time when six-day bicycle races, the so-called brutality of modern
football, and endurance tests of the automobile excite such a degree of
popular interest throughout the English-speaking world, it might not be
amiss to glance over the shoulder occasionally at a few records made by
some mute four-footed or feathered champions who have established records
in fields in which Nature, herself, as umpire, read the inexorable law of
necessity.
In reviewing some remarkable feats of animal endurance, the Chicago _News_
mentions the case of a dog that was dug out alive from a rabbit-hole, in
the Scilly Isles, after having been lost for a fortnight.
Continuing, this same authority says that whales and eagles come at the
head of creatures that longest survive the evils to which other fishes and
birds are heirs. Yet a whale has been found dead from a dislocated jaw. It
is also recorded that an elephant died as a result of gangrene in one of
its feet.
In a Scottish deer forest not long ago a stalking party came across a
magnificent golden eagle, dead, caught in a fox trap. He had been caught
by the center claw of one foot and had died of exhaustion in attempting to
escape.
By his side were two grouse and a partly eaten hare which other eagles had
brought to sustain him in his fight for life. If a rat had been caught by
his leg in a trap either he or his comrades would have bitten off the
imprisoned limb and released him.
The poor despised toad is not built to stand physical violence, but he
would fatten on imprisonment. Toads imprisoned in rocks for years--no one
knows how many--come to light from time to time, fat and well. They have
been found beneath deposits which, according to all accepted ideas of
geology, must have been long ages in process of formation. Unless
microbes, carried to them through the pores of the imprisoning rock, have
been their fare, it is certain, according to naturalists who ought to
know, that they have eaten nothing for an unthinkable period.